Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to customer relationship management and, more particularly, to systems and methods for the timely delivery of information and support to customers of a business entity.
Description of the Related Art
It is now commonplace for businesses and other entities to have a presence on one or more public social networks, each a “social media channel”. These social media channels may take the form, for example, of a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, or a LinkedIn feed. Increasingly, customers and prospective customers are using social network channels to post status inquiries, to make complaints, and to request information about a product or service. The same enterprise may also maintain a contact center and/or web portal for individuals seeking to consummate a purchase transaction, to make customer service queries, and/or to obtain assistance with selecting, installing, configuring or using a particular product.
Many customers of a business have similar, recurring questions for the business' contact center, staff, salespeople or other business representatives. New questions arise any time the business launches a new product or service, announces plans for such a launch, or changes existing products and services. External events impacting the business products and services can also prompt a set of new and then recurring questions from customers. These questions can tie up subject matter experts and/or the contact center agents that are called upon to provide answers to these questions. In the era of social networking, product complaints and issues uncovered by one person may spread like “wildfire” among a community of users and customers, with the marketplace now favoring those enterprises who are able to quickly react to such issues and address them forcefully and systematically.
To offer assistance to the visitors with queries or concerns, businesses typically host or sponsor a website having a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ (FAQs) section, or a navigable link to such a FAQ section. However, updating such a FAQ has heretofore required the assignment of personnel to the task of manually distilling common customer concerns and questions from, for example, a large body of records about customer inquiries. Due to the effort required, businesses update their FAQs rarely and, even then, only after some new obvious common customer issue or concern has been discovered. A relatively static FAQ, however, may not adequately address the need to quickly identify and respond to the issues of greatest concern to a community of users or customers, nor the need to construct and deliver an appropriate response so as to minimize any impact on an enterprise's online and social representation and enhance that enterprise's reputation. Moreover, since business personnel filters, compiles, prioritizes, and presents the FAQ items, the user community who is supposed to benefit from the FAQ is left out of the authoring process, thus decreasing the effectiveness of the FAQ.
A need therefore exists for systems and techniques which enable an enterprise to dynamically identify questions as they emerge within a community of users, and to automate, to the extent practicable, the process of constructing and disseminating responses to those questions. These systems and techniques need to allow the user community to actively influence the filtering, prioritizing, presentation, content creation, and dynamic management of questions and answers.